nextMEDIA – Where to Look Next? Trends for 2009

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Starting with an amazing slide of all of the trends and words that companies will need to know going forward, Lori’s presentation was very marketing and marketer focused.

What the lab does is allow people to get their hands on the latest technology in a comfortable, home like way.

Even with the downturned economy, online advertising is expected to grow from $24.5 billion in 2008 to $28.5 billion in 2009.

Open platforms are driving ubiquity. Where there is OpenSocial, and Google’s Android where things are able to scale, and be developed in an interesting way that hasn’t been done before and creates new opportunities for developers, brands and advertisers.

The new consumer reverses the 80/20 rule. Where you used to spend 80% of your money on distribution, and 20% on content, but that has switched, and is continuing to change and grow. Content is everywhere, but attention is limited.

Lori then moved into trends for 2009 that everyone here at nextMEDIA needs to know if they want to take advantage of the opportunities appearing.

Beyond the browser is the first one she wanted to cover with it becoming the new operating system on computers where applications are hosted online in the cloud, and the only thing you have directly on your computer is the browser.

The second one was the semantic web, where the browser or Internet websites learn from the behavior or interests of the user. A great example that she tossed out there was StumbleUpon, which learns what things you are interested in and adjusts its display accordingly. This changes the advertising on search ecosystem, as you can’t just advertise on general search results.

She also showed off Cooliris, a plugin for Firefox that allows you to browse the web in a pictorial way, rather than flat text.

Personal branding was an interesting addition to her presentation as well, which made me happy. I wondered if personal branding would be mentioned at this conference filled with companies and corporations.

“People are establishing themselves as experts… and that makes them powerful as influencers” – Lori Schwartz

She then shifted gears and started to focus on the transmission effect, where the length between our thoughts to the publish of that thought has become nearly instant. Content can’t be controlled, so now it becomes reputation management.

The new editorial is citizen journalism and the technology has grown in ways that you can live broadcast nearly anything to a large audience instantly.